Installing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on a ThinkPad T60p

Contents

Installing Unbuntu Feisty Fawn

Except for the T60p hardware setup section, THIS IS A DRAFT WRITTEN FROM MEMORY which has not been carefully checked.

The long, but easy way

Install earlier version of Ubuntu (6.06/6.10) and dist-upgrade. If you start from 6.06 you will have to upgrade to 6.10, and then upgrade to 7.04.

The fast way

Note: You can use Ubuntu 7.10 instead, in which the ATI issue is apparently fixed

Be sure to have a *wired* network connection ready (wifi will not work yet)

Download a ubuntu 7.04 feisty fawn image from ubuntu.com

Boot from the CD, and wait ... the installation will break down when attempting to start the graphical part of the installation (X).

The problem is, that the ATI driver required for X is not working. Luckily it is already in the ubuntu repos, so we just install it temporarily (in RAM), so we can get on with the installation. When you have a console prompt (in Kubuntu, you will need to remove the "splash" boot option to get the prompt), do a:

With any luck X should launch, so you can click on the desktop icon and continue the installation.

If X doesn't launch, try changing the Driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf from "vesa" to "fglrx", then restart X.

T60p hardware setup

Some cheaper T60p come with an Intel 3945 wireless card for 802.11a/b/g. This is supported out of the box in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) with no additional downloads. The following applies to more expensive models, for which wireless does not work out of the box.

Wireless

Some t60p (8744C9U) use an Atheros network device with this signature "Atheros Communications, Inc. Unknown device 0024 (rev 01)". It will work---not perfectly---with any Madwifi driver version later than subversion revision 2360. This means that the madwifi included in early releases of Feisty Fawn will *NOT* work.

instead of wget the madwifi which is indicated, make everything work
fairly well except that the wireless on/off hotkey does not affect the
wireless (only bluetooth) and the wireless light does not turn on.
Not a big deal, although annoying.

For reference, here is my version of these painless---but somewhat
lacking as far as the Thinkpad goes---instructions:

Unfortunately the card only achieves between 12 Mb/s (after suspend to
RAM, resuming after wired connection or turning it off) and 36 Mb/s
(at boot, and then only if I am sitting close to my wireless hub).

The network also disconnects at random times, although it almost always immediately
reconnects... at a lower speed.

This is not the performance I would expect---my old Thinkpad R51
running Gentoo reliably goes 54 Mb/s on the same network. Pretty good nonetheles
given that the good madwifi folk are
not getting all the help they could from Atheros.

(In case you have a firegl ATI graphics card: this last modprobe does
not break a good install.)

Step 8) Now, the wireless card works at top speed and reliably, and
the wireless hotkey and the wireless light work, and suspend to RAM
does not mess things up.

You may, however, find that the wireless does not kick in at boot,
this may be that the /etc/modules, which lists additional modules to
load at boots, specifies another wireless card driver.

This can be fixed as follows:

Edit the /etc/modules file as root, that is,

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Comment out with a "#" the entry(ies) which you suspect have to do
with wireless (in my case, it was ath_pci). For good measure, add
ndiswrapper.

Now, if you want to boot into wired, hotkey the wireless off, and if
you want to boot into wireless, hotkey the wireless on. You can also
switch from one to the other with the hotkey. The wireless also recovers
quickly from suspend to RAM (alternative: turn off the wireless prior
to closing the lid, and restart it).

Sometimes, the wireless does not connect right away. Toggling the hotkey usually takes care of the problem.

The fans are too noisy and can be throttled down by using the ACPI fan control script. Increase the min and max to 70, 100 on the GPU. This will lower the fan speed to <3000 for normal usage (XGL/Compiz fusion setup).

You should install a 'generic' kernel i favor of the i386 to gain better performance of the dual core, and better suspend.